Why would you care about another life if it is detached from your other lifes?
It might not be your carrot. Total liberation is apparently a pleasurable state. It also has the additional effects of not harming another being through our unresolved kamma through a rebirth.
Another way to show compassion is to move closer to liberation so that the transmitted kamma is of a lighter quality and inclined towards liberation. We regularly wish strangers well and even do good works for them in this lifetime. Sometimes our effects can eminstr past this life at least according to Buddhism.
I hope that helped.
If I understand you correctly, you say that it simply boils down to not wanting to harm any other being which includes “yourself” in the future. Right?
Yes, that’s the essence. I would also state that there isn’t a self that is reborn, but the unresolved actions and intentions that find the opportunity for resolution. Then a new self is born around those.
It’s important to know that Buddhism doesn’t believe in an eternal self.
Thanks for elaborating on it. Anatta was revolutionary at the time. I love it.
In every life you perform actions and thus create consequences. Right now you live a life that is shaped by consequences of your past lives. Due to karmic cycles, the same conditions come into your life, and since you do not care for your past lives and your past actions, you keep repeating the same mistakes. Thus you keep up the cycles and keep being born into Samsara.
So, you’re saying that because you want to escape samsara, you care about your future life - even in the abscence of karma.
By taking karma into consideration, this means that you can shape future beings because of the dependency. Does that mean that karma is a necessary condition for caring about your future self?
The conscious work with your karma is necessary. If you you want to enter Nirvana in the future, you need to start dissolving your karma (your behavior, psychological tendencies, etc.) now.
But then how do I know my next life won’t just ruin it all? I could be born into such a different culture that I wouldn’t even be aware of my actions and consequence.
I’m quite new to Buddhism so apologies if my question is silly.
You have a seed in you, the Buddhata, which is the core of your consciousness. This core collects all the experiences and lessons throughout every lifetime. Even if you are born with a different gender, in a different culture, the tendencies, reactions and cravings will be the same. Your way of being stays the same, as long as you don’t work on yourself. If you want to change profoundly, in a way that persists throughout lifetimes, you need to work on yourself. This means that you have to study yourself, your behaviors (physically, emotionally, mentally) and then change your behaviors according to the eight-fold principles.
Here is the thing, we will touch a very advanced point here: Just changing your behavior will only persist a little. You have your psychological tendencies, preferences, cravings, etc. because your Buddhata is trapped in psychological aggregates. An aggregate is a psychological function. For example, in one moment one of your aggregates tells you that you’d like some ice cream. In the next moment another aggregate says, that you wanted to have that beach body by summer time and you shouldn’t eat this ice cream. Then another aggregate takes over your attention and you end up binge-watching Netflix shows. These aggregates are carried over from lifetime to lifetime and keep us trapped in our typical behavior.
So here comes the advanced aspect: these aggregates need to be destroyed inside of us. This is called psychological death and needs thorough meditation, contemplation of oneself and finally the help of the deities, who have the power to dissolve these aggregates. This dissolution can take several incarnations, until the essence, the Buddhata, is finally free of all karmic tendencies and debts and can pass into Nirvana (karma = repeating cycles, Nirvana = beyond cyclic existence).
If you want to know more about this process, you can study the following course. It’s Gnostic, but its core is esoteric Tibetan Buddhism: https://glorian.org/learn/courses-and-lectures/bhavachakra-the-wheel-of-becoming
This. The topic is quite complex, but even if it is true there is no self that will be reborn in another life, there still is a kind of “consciousness” that is shaped by karma and that will get rebirth. This of course if you don’t escape the cycle or bow to be reborn in a Pure Land.
